“A music writer said we’re like a candy apple with a razor blade inside, which I think is a really great way to put it,� says Joy Zipper’s Tabitha Tindale. Vinny Cafiso, the other half of Joy Zipper (and Tabitha’s other half in real life), admits that he “doesn’t like to give away too much� and says he and Tabitha are indeed “flowering it up a bit to hide the darkness underneath.�

There is an exquisite sweetness to the Joy Zipper sound. The tone of American Whip, the duo’s second album (due Feb. 22 on Dangerbird Records), is set by “Christmas Song,� which boasts a dreamy chorus – “I love you more than a thousand Christmases/ I want you more than any gift I can think of� – that sticks like Juicy Fruit. The Alpha Centauri keyboard effects, super-groovy organ line and that one Summer Of Love guitar progression give way to ecstatic stacked harmonies recalling The Beach Boys and The Beatles, two of Tabitha and Vince’s favorite antecedents.

Joy ZipperPerhaps equally important to Joy Zipper’s sonic character, however, are bands like My Bloody Valentine, Stereolab, The Breeders and The Velvet Underground. And there’s this line, which is likely to keep “Christmas Song� off the lips of most carolers: “I feel you now ‘cause I’m deep in madness.�

The chorus to “Baby You Should Know� – “That’s what I see when I see in your eyes� – sounds like it could have been written by Burt Bacharach, but what about the part that goes, “Baby you should know this time/ That every thought you have is mine?� Tabitha insists it’s a love song. Why, then, does the specter of mind control, or, at the very least, garden-variety manipulation, seem to be hovering just over her shoulder?

The candy apple also glistens with violins, viola, cello, fluegelhorn and glockenspiel, but take care you don’t cut your tongue on the intimations of psychosis, “this terrible thing coming over me,� the “never ending search for a suitable enemy,� loading the gun and getting the rope, becoming invisible … mannequins.

Asked what the hell these songs are about, Tabitha rattles off some possibilities: “Life and death and fear.� When pressed, she says: “Vinny lost his father when he was five, and his mother died a few years ago. He’s kind of alone, and alone with his thoughts a lot of the time.�

Not that all of Joy Zipper’s stream-of-consciousness abstractions are necessarily cause for concern. One of the best moments in American Whip is the sing-songy refrain from “Out Of The Sun,� but the lyrics – “Then it came to me/ From another place/ And I buried it/ I buried it� – feel ominous. Still, Tabitha laughs when she explains: “It was Easter, and Vinny gave me this little Easter basket, which is so out of character for him. But he colored this egg and put it in the basket. For some reason, I said, ‘Let’s go outside and bury this egg’ – not for any real purpose, just because it’s fun to do weird things like that. Then, that afternoon, we were working on a song and we needed some words, so I just put down, ‘And I buried it.’� Not really that sinister after all.

The dichotomy driving Joy Zipper’s artistic modus operandi is reflected by Tabitha and Vinny themselves. Yes, he’s dark-haired and she’s blond. He’s introverted and she’s outgoing. He’s been playing music as long as he can remember; she started when she met him. But there’s a deeper, downright symbiotic, temperamental dynamic at the heart of Joy Zipper that gives it its hypnotic power.

Vinny thinks back to the time in his life just before Tabitha appeared: “I was living in Long Island, where I’m from. Every night, these guys I was in a band with, we’d sit in the parking lot and get stoned. But when I met Tabitha, she wanted to go into the city; she wanted to travel; she wanted to do all this stuff. I really needed that because my friends were potheads and they didn’t want to do anything. I was depressed. I kept thinking, God, what am I doing? Tab had so much life in her. At that point, I was ready for someone with that kind of spirit to come along. So when I met her, right away, I was, like, whoa, this is great. We had an instantaneous connection.�

They met at a Battle Of The Bands contest in Franklin Square, Long Island, on the Hempstead Turnpike. “The place was called Hot Rocks,� Tabitha says. “Isn’t that perfect?� “This was right after high school,� she continues. “I was living in the city. I’d come back to Long Island to see some friends and they said I had to see this band. They were amazing. Vinny was playing guitar. There was something about him. Right when I saw him, I said, ‘Hmm.’ And then … you know … I stalked him.�

Vinny recollects: “I got a call from a guy I was in the band with saying there was this girl who wanted to come down to rehearsal. I figured she liked the lead singer. I didn’t want to think anything of it. But when she came down, she spent a lot of time talking to me, and I knew.�

At first, Tabitha was just the band’s biggest booster and Vinny’s de facto manager. But, says Vinny, “the band broke up, and I was just doing four-track recordings by myself. I was never a singer; I never thought my vocals were good enough. So I would say, ‘Hey Tab, would you come over here and double what I’m doing?’ My vocals were as good as they could be, but with the addition of hers on top of mine, it seemed to complete the vocal. When we first did it, I thought, that was cool, but then people who heard it really responded to how perfect our voices sounded together. So that just became the band.�

Tabitha soon started writing as well, and she and Vinny decided to name the band after her mother. That’s right – Tabitha’s mother is named Joy Zipper: Joy is her given name; Zipper is the surname of Tabitha’s stepfather. (And while we’re at it, here’s a little story about the name of the album: “We were mixing in London,� Tabitha explains. “One day on the way to the studio, we saw this ice cream truck go by. In England, the ice cream men have names for their trucks. This one was called ‘American Whip.’ We thought those were two weird words to hear together. We liked the way it sounded, and it felt like that name would mean different things to different people.�)

Joy Zipper has had much success in the U.K. – American Whip was released there in March of 2004 – and Vinny and Tabitha spend half the year there. They spend the other half in their New York City home studio, but there is no discounting the central role Long Island has played in their lives.

Vinny grew up in East Meadow, surrounded by musical instruments; his father played keyboards and the mandolin and accordion. Vinny taught himself to play guitar. “I loved music – music was everything, my whole life,� he says. “The Beatles’ first album was the first album I ever bought. It was $4.00. At school, my friends and I would teach each other songs on guitar. My favorite songs were the classic rock stuff. The contemporary music of that time was really horrible, new wave and Bon Jovi. I didn’t have MTV anyway, so I just stuck with the old stuff.�

He’s not sure why he started writing his own songs. “I don’t know why people write,� he says. “There must be something deep inside you that needs to come out. I’m kind of shy, so maybe it’s about not being able to express yourself socially; you do it through songs. It’s easier. It’s a defense in a way – you can say things through writing that you can’t really say in everyday life.�

Tabitha’s early days were also steeped in music. “I moved around a lot as a kid,� she says. “My parents divorced when I was six, and I lived with my dad at first. He would decide, ‘Let’s go to Florida,’ and we’d move. He was a bartender, so we could do that. When I was around 10, I went to live with my mom and my stepdad in New York. We later moved to Long Island, to Huntington. No matter where I was living, though, music was a big part of my growing up. The Beatles were always on. My parents were sort of hippies, and with that kind of lifestyle, music was always playing.� Tabitha has learned to play keyboards and guitar, but, she says, with typical candor, “I’m not a trained musician by any means – I can play our songs, but that’s about it.�

That seems to be enough. Joy Zipper’s initial recordings were passed among friends until they landed with composer and DJ David Holmes, who played them on his U.K. radio shows. “They were songs we made in the bedroom,� Tabitha informs. “We got a deal and we released those demos as our album.�

Despite these humble origins, the record established a presence among English tastemakers. The pump was well primed for American Whip, which inspired NME to say: “Imagine Jack ‘n’ Meg [White, of The White Stripes] taking a holiday from reincarnating the Delta blues and deciding to listen to Beach Boys records all day. Now you’ve got Joy Zipper.� The Times reported: “American Whip is packed with woozy, sun-soaked pop songs, dreamy Sixties psychedelia and sugary vocals.� Uncut spoke rapturously of “arrangements burnished with summery harmonies and silky strings,� and Q called Vinny and Tabitha “masters of an otherworldly perfect sound that seems to make time stand still.�

The band also drew praise for recruiting Holmes and My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields to participate (the former contributed production to “Christmas Song� and “Baby You Should Know,� among others; the latter added a spot of production and had a hand in mixing several tracks). Buoyed by the rave reviews, Joy Zipper toured with Air and Turin Brakes and collaborated with Zero 7 (on the compilation Another Late Night).

Few of the band’s fans suspected that Tabitha and Vinny had recorded the guts of American Whip in a Long Island state of mind, though the lovely “Valley Stream� provided a hint. “We’d just gotten back from England and we didn’t have an apartment because we’d let ours go before we left,� Tabitha says, “so we stayed at Vinny’s aunt’s house in Valley Stream, in the basement. It was a weird time for us. Our label was falling apart. I was working in a juice shop in the city. Vinny was just home writing. We were really depressed.�

“My grandparents bought the house in Valley Stream in the ‘50s,� Vinny elaborates. “I spent a lot of summers there, which was nice because it was a very ordered existence. My grandparents were kind of strict. At my house, in East Meadow, there was a lot of chaos. My aunt never got married, so she lived with my grandparents. My grandmother died a couple of years ago, and my aunt still lives there. We didn’t have any money, so my aunt let us stay in the basement. It was an uncomfortable experience. There was nothing to do except write songs. I guess we made up an alternate reality because we couldn’t deal with the reality of what we were in the basement at my aunt’s house.�

Vinny’s a private person, but with some prodding he will reveal that he thought about “death, fear of death, fear of abandonment,� much of it relating to his father. “When you’re a little kid, you don’t always feel grief right away,� he says, “but after high school, when you’re out in the world, it just hits you. Some of that started leaking out. A lot of our first album was about that, my father dying. It made me feel better writing about it. Even talking to people about those songs, in interviews, made it seem like a story, something I could have some distance from.� He says that after his mother died, amid the sadness, he was surprised by the sense of relief he felt at being free of parental expectation. But it was not lost on him that, in a way, there was no longer anyone standing between him and the Great Beyond. The reverberations of these existential epiphanies can be felt throughout American Whip.

Fittingly, the recording of “Valley Stream� that appears on the album is the demo laid down in the basement. “We tried to re-record it when we went to Scotland,� says Tabitha. “We tried to re-record it when we got our new equipment in the city. But it was always that eight-track demo that had the honesty.�

The band did manage to record the more orchestrated sections of the album in Scotland, at Glasgow’s Cava Studios. “The strings and horns were done there,� Tabitha confirms. “Cava is in a huge, old [1872] converted church on the river [Kelvin]. When the string players recorded their parts for the song ‘33x,’ the sound just filled the room. It was so beautiful. It made me cry.�

It’s a response Vinny could scarcely have anticipated back when he was playing what he describes as “heavy, drone-y noise rock� with his buddies at that joint on the turnpike. But, working with Tabitha, he has developed something, something transcendent, he may never have discovered on his own. Ironically, Tabitha says, “We write the best when we’re alone. I’ll visit my family in Florida, and Vinny will write three songs. Or he’ll take a shower, and while he’s in there, I’ll sit down at the keyboard and write a song. So that’s how they start. But we always finish them together.�

“I can do anything, play anything, for Tab and I don’t feel embarrassed,� Vinny says. “There’s no weirdness. It’s because I trust her. Making music with her is almost an escapist thing for me. It makes me feel relaxed and puts me in a little bit of a trance. It’s like the best drug you could ever imagine. There’s a lot of pressure on everyone, a lot of shit going on. It feels good to sometimes just let it go, escape that world and just stay inside this other one we’ve created together.�

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